Essay Contest: “I Drank and Drank, and Then One Day I Stopped”

I recognize them as soon as they walk in. Some are carrying Bibles, but they aren’t the church groups who come in huge numbers and leave me religious pamphlets for a tip. They aren’t the coffee kids who come in stone sober but wide awake at 4:00 A.M. due to dangerous amounts of caffeine and an adrenaline rush from reading anime and having nerdy, incestuous relationships with each other. I have never met a single one of these folks walking into my restaurant, but as they set their books on the table, I immediately know how they are affiliated, and my heart sinks as I realize they are sitting in my section.

I set up a tray with glasses of water and whisper to the other waitress to make two more pots of coffee. I walk over and distribute the waters as quickly as possible, eyes down, businesslike. Before I can say a word, 12 people have told me they need coffee, and three more have left for a cigarette, despite the fact that they just came in from having a cigarette. One man, with the dopey smile of the brainwashed, orders a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. The older lady next to him beams proudly and tells me he’s having an anniversary. Without thinking, I ask, “How long?” and immediately realize my fatal mistake. I have given myself away.

The very happy gentleman simply says, “Five months,” and the table grows quiet as everyone looks up at me. Their excitement is palpable as they start speaking the code of what I think of as the least cool club ever: “How many days?” they ask me. “Where is your home group?” I look over at the coffee kids in the corner booth, with their X-rated manga comics spread out on the table, and the girls leaning over in Hot Topic corsets that barely encase their pale breasts, and wish desperately that I were part of their group instead of this one. But like it or not, I’m in this group, and they know it.

Hi, my name is Adrienne, and I’m an alcoholic.

An alcoholic will always be an alcoholic, whether still drinking or in recovery. Or so I learned from one of the seven AA meetings I attended before I realized that I would rather eat glass than (A) talk about all the wretched things I did while drunk; and (B) hang around people so willing to hug me. I don’t have the Big Book, I don’t have a sponsor, I don’t have the chips.

But I do have almost three and a half years. I took my last drink on November 25, 2007, the day before my twenty-second birthday and two weeks after the DUI that involved my flipping a minivan and failing a Breathalyzer at nearly three times the legal limit. For the skeptics who think my drinking was well within the normal range for a girl my age, I hasten to throw in the detail that my last drink was 36 ounces of warm Keystone Light at 8:30 in the morning before I went to work, my usual breakfast to ease my headache and steady my hands.

Throughout the nearly five-year epic that was my drinking life, I never quite admitted to having a problem, nor did I ever give up hope that I would be miraculously fixed. I would rationalize that I was young and that partying and experimenting with drugs was a way of life for college kids, conveniently skipping the part where I had dropped out of school. When asked, I would give some pathetic excuse that I thought the university system was bullshit, but really, I could barely go to class sober; I could barely go to the DMV sober. My drinking was no party. It was constant and necessary. There was always a nagging feeling, a voice from somewhere deep in my mind, telling me that I had a very serious problem. The only thing that could dull that feeling and muzzle that voice was alcohol. Sometimes I would hear someone use a phrase like “I kicked the habit” or “I haven’t had a drink in 10 years,” and I’d imagine that I could get better too. I daydreamed about encountering people who had witnessed me at my worst and shrugging off those days. “God, I was a mess back then,” I’d say, laughing. “Oh, I quit drinking years ago.”

But just wishing myself sober wasn’t going to make me stop. Among my circle of friends and coworkers, I became well-known as a hopeless drunk. Even on weeknights, when everyone else was only mildly intoxicated, I had to be carried out of the room. And I suffered the shame of being the worst drunk-girl stereotype. When a young man drinks himself into a stupor every night and then awakes oblivious the next day, he is considered, at worst, a douche bag. At best, he posts a photo on the Internet of himself passed out with a Sharpie mustache and is the life of the party and everyone’s best bud. When a young woman parties too hard, she’s a mental case. Open up any celebrity magazine and take your pick of young, beautiful, completely screwed-up girls, stuck in their endless cycles of drug busts, DUI arrests and rehab. We try to analyze the tragic girl, figure out how she got that way: When you have no control over yourself, people wonder whether you were damaged as a child, and they whisper in horror about what you said or how you danced, or which article of clothing you removed in a fast-food restaurant. They wonder what awful thing happened to you to cause your outrageous lack of self-worth. I could hear the whispers and giggles and sometimes even the excuses that friends and boyfriends made for me. I had the terrible good luck to have a very sick and eventually dead mother, and so people accepted my behavior as normal. They blamed my excess on the close-up view of cancer I had starting at age 11, or her death six years later. Many thought that a girl like me had good reasons to want to forget everything. Over the years, I’ve heard the same tired refrain over and over again: Girls without mothers are lost. Bullshit. Girls without mothers are sad. Getting lost was a choice.

Blacking out occurred at some point every night. I would wake up every morning and do damage control. If I had properly removed my contacts, I reasoned, then I must have been OK. I’d look out the window, see my car and feel relief; never mind the fact that I didn’t remember driving it or parking it on the front lawn. Checking my bank account was next. The nights that I had used just my debit card were acceptable, but I knew that if I’d used an ATM, large amounts of cash in the middle of the night could have been for only one thing. It’s hard to look back now and realize how easily I could have been hurt or taken advantage of during a drug deal. I was never one to say no to anything, and the only thing that could stop me was the dreaded “insufficient funds.”

The last step was finding my phone. Some days it was fine, with no new contacts I couldn’t remember adding or text messages from people asking whether I was alive. Most days, however, ranged from mild embarrassment to panic as I would piece together events of the previous night. I’d find out from friends that I had started a brawl, called 911 looking for my purse, or gotten in a brutal fight with my boyfriend while singing karaoke because I decided halfway through the duet that I should get to sing both Sonny’s and Cher’s lines. I’d wake up surrounded by things I’d stolen, from street signs and traffic cones to framed pictures from whoever’s house I’d been to the evening before. And my growing shame would send me hunting for the cans of beer I knew my drunk self had hidden the night before for just this moment. Only when I was properly buzzed could I find any of it funny.

As easy as it would be to lay out my history, pointing to specific events as the reasons for my collapse, as though life were a giant game of Jenga, I won’t do it. Every drink—from my first, at age 10, to the start of my daily abuse at 17, to my last warm beer at 21—was a choice. I’m simply a person who refused to act like an adult, who took everything for granted and managed to feel shortchanged, a girl who was positive that the blame belonged anywhere but on her shoulders. I know what could have happened that night with the minivan. I know that instead of the expensive hassle of being charged with a DUI and attending court-mandated alcohol counseling, there could have been a memorial of crosses, a whole family of them, in that curve beside the road. And yet that incident wasn’t the end. I woke up the following Monday, having had the decency to remain coherent for at least one night, and I drank. I drove drunk to meet the lawyer my dad had hired for me. I never went back to class. I stayed drunk for two more weeks, culminating in a Thanksgiving when I’m told I consumed nothing but vodka.

And then I just stopped.

If I knew what it was that made me quit, I’d be hawking it in a self-help book on morning TV, making millions. I woke up after what my friends have affectionately referred to as “The Lost Weekend,” and I just didn’t drink anymore. I was sick of myself. I knew that if I didn’t stop drinking, I would die or, worse, spend the rest of my life being this person even I couldn’t stand. I was foolish enough, though, to think that deciding to take my last drink was going to be the hard part. It turned out I had no idea how hard it would get.

Luckily, there are many positive myths about living sober, because had I known what that first winter would be like, I would have pickled myself to death on cheap wine while watching a Wife Swap marathon. The only problem solved by not drinking was my drinking problem. Everything else was the same, just clearer and easier to remember. I had always known I was a mean drunk, but as it turned out I was sometimes just a mean person with a cruel sense of humor. I also thought alcohol was to blame for the fact that I had dropped out of college to be a waitress; nope, I was just lazy. In fact, not being drunk all the time made these and all of my flaws glaringly obvious. I had a lot of cavities, my hair didn’t grow fast enough, I broke out easily. When I stopped drinking, I lost all ability to dance or flirt with strangers. At bars I had nothing to do with my hands, so I shoved them into my pockets, making me look either angry or cold. Yes, I kept going to bars (a major misstep, according to Alcoholic Law), not because I loved the smell or because the stools are comfortable, but because I was 22 years old. I couldn’t exactly ask new friends to sit in my car and drink herbal tea and chain-smoke, which was my major hobby that first winter. And were I to relapse, I was certain it would never be in public. That’s just tacky. I would be at home, alone, and I’m sure Wife Swap would be involved.

Still, even those first few months weren’t the worst part. Now that a good chunk of time has passed, when I meet someone new, alcohol always comes up. A casual “Wanna grab a drink?” has turned into a 25-minute explanation, which includes me choking back tears and drawing a diagram of what my car looked like after the crash. If you thought meeting a significant other’s parents was stressful, imagine doing it while turning down the very expensive wine they bought especially for that occasion. There was also the party I ruined by grabbing what I thought was my cup of soda and gulping down Southern Comfort. I then spit out the drink, started crying and called my dad, wailing that I had relapsed.

Some people are positive I simply didn’t know how to drink, that I’ve matured since then. They then proceed to try to peer-pressure me into drinking. Some people are just plain confused. “Well, can you have wine?” they ask. The saddest are the still-hooked people who get a look of jealousy in their eyes when I say I haven’t had a drink in more than three years. Those are the people I try to avoid because, unlike the devout 12-steppers, I can’t help anyone. I barely made it off that sinking ship alive, and I can’t risk being dragged back under. Although I’m steadfast in my decision to never drink again, I don’t have a great track record for keeping my word. In fact, not drinking is so far the greatest accomplishment of my life, which, some days, I find frankly depressing. Instead of getting ahead, I’m now just finally even with everybody else. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and most people don’t ever even need to do it.

I couldn’t tell you what step I’m at, but there’s one thing AA has right: I will always be an alcoholic. My heart still skips when I realize the liquor stores are closing in 10 minutes, before I remember that it doesn’t matter anymore. I panic when I drive past cops. And though alcohol was my first choice, I was always up for some variety, so I still get excited when I’m in the presence of any illicit drug use, until the adult part of my brain reminds me I’m being stupid.

Since drinking and doing drugs can’t be my sole activities anymore, I’ve started doing other things compulsively, very few of which are productive. The first few months involved cigarettes and coffee, which were both hobbies and food groups. After I quit smoking, I started exercising in an obsessive and dangerous fashion, until I realized that if I developed an eating disorder on top of my alcoholism, all I would need is an affair with a teacher before I became my own TV show on the CW.

Now I’m a college student again. There are other 24-year-old sophomores, but mostly they are veterans back from Iraq, or single parents of small children, or exchange students getting degrees in a completely foreign tongue. This can make me feel inadequate, that I’m behind in life, but we all have obstacles. And I don’t ever lie about my circumstances. I could dwell on the years I lost or the people I’ve hurt, and sometimes I do. I know how proud my father is, and I’m embarrassed that not drinking is the best thing I’ve given him. But then I remind myself that I escaped from a hell that very few people ever come back from. I wasted five years of my life drinking; some people waste them all. So from here on out, I’ve decided that every misstep is mine. Every bad joke belongs to me. My addiction is still here and always will be, but it will never have the control it once did, because it is so small in comparison to the rest of me.

And so I go, crying and laughing and spilling shit along the way. I thought in quitting, I would gain perspective, maybe achieve enlightenment. I thought I could find the god I have desperately searched for. I never did. That could have been a crushing blow, but I found something else, something wonderful and blasphemous. I realized I get to wake up every morning, happy or not. Lots of people don’t get that. Who am I to complain that I can’t have Chambord for breakfast?

Adrienne Edenburn-MacQueen is now a junior at Southern Connecticut State University, majoring in history and economics.